This bookmark isn’t in the best of shape, but like a lot of these Bookstores No More bookmarks it represents a bit of history. Macondo is of course the fictional town that provides the setting for Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it’s also the name of a second-hand bookstore that was located just across the street from City Hall in Guelph for 36 years. “Established 1978 — Open 7 Days a Week.” It closed doors in 2014 for all the usual reasons. As the owner put it, “It’s a business that is no longer sustainable. It has been a great business over the last 36 years, but it has slowly fallen off. And we recognize that it is a big cultural shift that’s not going to change, or change in time to help us.”

Book: Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Mont-Tremblant is best known for its ski resort, but you can also pick up bookmarks there. I don’t ski.

Book: The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Hand carved from Quebec. Kind of bulky for use (it’s actually quite thick), but I like the concept.

Book: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Bookmarked Bookmarks

These are oversize examples of paperclip bookmarks, which tends to be a cutesy-novelty style. I’ve never actually used a regular office paperclip as a bookmark but I’ve seen people who have. I guess they’re fit for purpose, but they’re not easy on the pages.

Book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Original Murano glass on sterling silver, from Venice. The inset is just glued on and I had to re-glue it at some point. Still very pretty.

Book: Henry Vaughn: The Complete Poems edited by Alan Rudrum

Bookmarked Bookmarks

This is a bit of a fudge for my Bookstores No More series, since there are still four Book City locations open in Toronto. But this bookmark came from the original Book City store, which opened in 1976 in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. It’s the one I went to when I lived just down the road a bit. It was Book City’s flagship store, but closed doors in 2014. Fondly remembered!

Book: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Bookmarked Bookmarks

In most if not all of my Bookstores No More posts I’ve been showcasing bookmarks from stores that closed down in the face of competition first from big box stores and then from online retailers. Book Depository is a bit of an exception in that it began as an online bookseller, based in the UK, in 2004. Over the years I ordered quite a few titles from them, and when the books came they usually included a Book Depository bookmark.

Little did I know that these bookmarks would soon be part of the Bookstores No More collection. Book Depository was bought out by Amazon in 2011 and a dozen years later, in 2023, Amazon closed it down. I guess it just didn’t make any sense having two sites offering what was basically the same service. In any event, here are some bookmarks to let you take a trip down a (recent) memory lane.

Book: The Riverside Chaucer edited by Larry Dean Benson and F. N. Robinson

Bookmarked Bookmarks

This is a particular kind of bookmark where the page slips into a cloth pocket. They go by different names, but this one, by Dane Jane Designs of Cambridge, is called a corner bookmark. I thought it made sense to pair it with “cat” in the OED, which made for an awkward entry at the top of the page. Oh well.

Book: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Bookmarked Bookmarks

I’ve never been on a cruise. But I know people who have. I guess some cruise ships have small onboard libraries, even though print is about as dated now as the age of sail.

Anyway, if you took a book out of this ship’s library they gave you a bookmark as a reminder to bring it back. As if that $25 deposit wasn’t enough of an incentive. That seems pricey to me.

Book: Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World by Ana Siljak

Bookmarked Bookmarks

On the flip side of the pendant it says “Rêve.” Because Canada is bilingual.

Book: The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die by Keith Payne

Bookmarked Bookmarks